


Thou Art the Ruins

by warriorpoet



Category: Homeland
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Postpartum Depression, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-03 01:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2832467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warriorpoet/pseuds/warriorpoet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Maybe because you knew then how much you loved your own child. Maybe because you were just sick of death."</i>
</p><p>Carrie finds a way to her daughter.</p><p>(Spoilers through episode 4x12)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thou Art the Ruins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lizwontcry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizwontcry/gifts).



Carrie watches the thing inside her grow and imagines it's an extension of her grief.

Then it becomes not just an extension: it's the whole thing. She tries to visualise pulling any thought of Brody's death, any regret, any anger, out of her head and pushing it down to the growing expanse of her womb. Storing it for safekeeping, for dealing with later. Because if those thoughts stay in her head, she's going to fucking lose it.

When it hits her that she's going to have to _live_ with this thing, she gets scared. This lump of sorrow that one day will learn to walk and talk and won't understand why, by virtue of its DNA and nothing else, it's been imbued with every fucked up, horrible thing in the world.

At the next sonogram she asks to know the sex of the baby. So it's a baby, a girl, not a thing, not an "it", not a receptacle of misery and fear and the prospect of spending her whole fucking life alone that she can jettison and be done with. 

It doesn't help much.

*

A nurse hands it -- _her_ \-- to Carrie when she's barely a few minutes old. 

She looks down at her, this small thing that already looks so angry at her, like she's been feeding on Carrie's panic and grown sick from it. 

_This isn't mine_ , she wants to say. _It belongs to somebody else. Take it back. There's been a mistake. I was gestating grief, not this._

"Such a sweet girl!" the nurse beams down at Carrie.

Carrie huffs out her nose and stiffly holds the baby. She tries to smile down at it.

If she weren't numb from the epidural, if there weren't still gloved hands doing something between her legs, she thinks she'd try to get up and walk out.

"Got a name yet?"

Brodie can be a girl's name, she's thought about that. It seems like cursing herself, though, resigning herself to a life of yelling "Brodie!" up the stairs at a child slamming a door at her, hearing the jeering of the crowd and seeing his cyanotic face projected behind her eyes.

"No," Carrie says. "Not yet."

She looks down again, and can barely even recognise her own arms, let alone the thing held in them.

*

Carrie leaves. She leaves as soon as she can. It's sooner than expected when the position in Kabul comes up and she runs for it. 

Saul comes down from New York before she goes. Carrie knows immediately that Maggie's using him to try to talk her out of it and she goes on the defensive, swinging wild verbal punches.

"This isn't the right thing for you," Saul tells her.

"It is _exactly_ the right thing for me and you know it," she snaps, pacing her room, throwing her things in a bag.

"After Tehran, after... everything that's happened – "

"What is it that's happened, Saul? What makes anything different about me trying to do my job? Other than the fact that you have no authority to tell me how to do it anymore?"

"As a friend, I do."

"Yeah, well, as a friend, mind your own fucking business."

He looks at her sadly. "As someone concerned for your safety, and the safety of the people around you, I don't think you're up to it. Right now, Carrie, you are not well enough to do this."

"Then what makes you think I'm well enough to do _this_?" She throws her arms open wide, taking in the baby's room down the hall, the house, her life, the whole fucking world. "I am _dying_ here, Saul. I need to do something where I know what the fuck I'm doing."

Saul blocks her exit from the room. "So do it in Istanbul. Take her with you. This child has done nothing to deserve to be parentless."

They stare each other down, and the warmth in his eyes, the concern, knocks Carrie out in the first round.

"Get the fuck out of my way," she says, and pushes past him.

*

She goes alone. It's death on a screen by day, her daughter on a screen by night.

One is easier to deal with than the other. It's not the way it should be, but that's the way it is.

*

Her heart is a wound that scabs over, slowly, cracking and bleeding sometimes when she's alone, chasing sleep and trying to block out the sounds of war.

She patches up the cracks in her armour, picks at the pieces of shrapnel that begin to worm their way out. Seals it all up, shuts it all down.

Nothing is getting in. Nobody gets in again.

*

Playing the part was easier when she was away. She'd taken to it like a new cover story, like she'd memorized the child's name, time and date of birth, length and weight, from counterfeit documents. She'd tell Maggie how much she missed the baby, how happy she was to see her. She kept a photograph that she never looked at by her bedside, just in case, just in case someone came looking and the story had to hold up.

Holding up the cover isn't the same thing as trying to live it.

Carrie had hoped she might have grown in to the story, some fake it till you make it shit, if she played the part of the regretfully distant mother well enough, she'd start to believe it.

Being back, being told she has to _stay_ back, indefinitely, she's too present. Regretfully present.

She tries, she really does. She grabs desperately for the thing she has in common with this baby: Brody. Brody, who still occupies her mind far too fucking often, who this kid will probably never know about.

She tries to remember being in love. Tries to attach it to Frannie. It doesn't stick.

Carrie doesn't recognize her own hands as they hold the baby underwater, doesn't recognize the thing she's holding down.

She sees him, cyanotic, decerebrate posturing, before she snaps back and yanks Frannie out of the tub. 

*

Maggie's pissed at her when she leaves again. Carrie doesn't want to bother her with the pretence of weekly Skype calls. Fuck, even every other week, or once a month, seems like bothering her too much. Somewhere in the back of her mind she thinks Maggie will just get fed up with it, get fed up with Carrie and their father for not doing what they're supposed to do or what they promised to do. She'll take Frannie somewhere. Find her a real home, parents who chose her.

Carrie stays out of touch. When everything in Islamabad goes to hell, she couldn't get the time to check in even if she wanted to.

*

She stands among the bodies in the embassy. Her clothes smell like fire and blood, her skin feels too hot and tight against her flesh. It all chips away at her, the patched up parts of her armour holding tenuously together, but still fused.

Then something breaks through, a devastating injury. The armour cracks, her heart starts to bleed fresh.

*

When she finally gets back to Maggie and hears that Dad's dead, the first conscious thought she has is of Frannie.

Maggie holds her up to the webcam, pale and chubby and red hair and blue eyes and just so... _alive_. 

Carrie looks at her, touches the cold screen. Wants to laugh and cry.

They have something in common right now, her and this child. 

They're just two girls with dead fathers and absent mothers.

*

Carrie is sick of death.

When she's back at Maggie's she wanders aimlessly into her father's empty room. She touches the clothes in his closet, the knickknacks on his dresser. The pill dispenser with half the week counted out, half of it gone.

Frannie is asleep when Carrie finally goes in to see her. She stands by the crib a while, her hands clutching the railing, before tentatively touching her daughter's back. She feels rise and fall of her baby's breathing.

Her eyes close against the tears, and she lets out a breath of relief. 

*

She screams her mother out of the house and then goes to sit by her daughter.

Carrie thinks about what it'd be like, if Frannie could remember the entirety of her brief life up till this point. If the first words she learned to speak were "Fuck you. Get the fuck out."

It's not the same thing, Carrie tells herself. She's nothing like her mother. She came back before it was too late.

She tells herself that over and over.

*

There's nothing like getting your whole worldview fucked in one go. The things you thought you knew about yourself, the people you thought you could still count on, the people you thought you might get to count on more in the future. Gone. And it just keeps happening.

Coming back from Missouri, she doesn't call Maggie. Telling her they have a brother isn't something she wants to do over the phone. She feels bad enough that Maggie had to tell her Dad was dead over Skype. So Maggie's surprised to see her.

"What happened?" she asks.

Carrie shakes her head and moves past her sister, up the stairs, to her room where Frannie is sleeping quietly in her crib. 

Carrie picks her up, and the baby cries as she wakes, but Carrie pats her back and whispers shushing sounds into her soft red hair until she settles.

On the bed, she pulls Frannie into her lap, holds her. This wriggling body, this alive thing, that once she tried to store her grief in so she could walk away from it all. Her daughter, the embodiment of death, the fruit of her womb. The only thing she has left.

She clings to Frannie, whispers, "I'm so sorry," to her. This time, she means it for the past, not the future.

Carrie holds her, makes her something new. A bright, flashing beacon, warning death to keep at bay.


End file.
